Morgan Williams
I’ve been pondering the history of writing lately. As we slip into the annual Words in Winter festival at the end of August I thought it timely to go back to where it all began. Seems human mark making to communicate began as a way of tracking the sale of goods and services via pictographs in the Neolithic era. Kind of like a big sales spread sheet in pictures!
It wasn’t long before it evolved into a whole pictorial language to describe religious and government ideas too. Later a phonetic alphabet was added by the Greeks and others. As always things sped up with the advent of technology and the printing press around 1400 and again much later with typewriters. Most recently computers and smart phones came onto the scene and “BAM!” we now have a full suite of written digital communications too – everything from emails and websites to blogs and social media, in our hands, at our fingertips, 24/7!
With this explosion of the written format, I suddenly thought to ask ChatGPT how much text was generated last year, and it said approximately 922 Exabytes! Of course I had no idea how much that is. Apparently 5 exabytes roughly equals all the words ever spoken by all humans ever! Yep folks, it’s loads and increasing around 25% per year. Mind blowing right! But hang on, did my AI query include AI itself? I refined my question to how many ‘human generated words’ and it said a tidy 300 trillion. And how many are creative words (books, poems, movies, songs etc) and it comes in at an even more comprehensible 300 Billion. Creative writing is “rich but rare” it tells me. Of course, I then had to ask how many “creative” words per person. It comes down to an average of only 37 words per person. Wow, I’m in the game! I whipped out my calculator, with this monthly article you’re reading and some poems plus a novel on the go I’m sitting around the 10,000 “creative words” per year mark. Not bad for someone who was basically an “‘”email operator” for work only a few short years ago. When I turned 50, I discovered that my written legacy stood at around 250,000 emails. Mostly long messages from meetings about web projects and design briefings. Nothing to help people really ponder, think, learn, laugh, or cry.
I’m a late bloomer, I know. My love and obsession with the written word seems to know no bounds right now though. If you’re like me and are an avid word lover, jump onto the Words In Winter site for two weekends of literary goodness this August.
As part of the festival at Radius we will be hanging a group show called Un-Read – an exploration of text and art in various mediums. Plus, a parallel exhibition and book launch called Paper Animals by local artist David M Lewis, exploring vibrant paper cut-outs, which are a playful homage to the animal world. Both shows officially launch Fri 22nd August 6.30-7.30.
For more info visit the Radius website and follow the links.
Morgan Williams is the co-director with Kim Percy of Radius Art Space. His art practice spans a 30 year period and explores a diverse range of mediums and topics.
